Hello and welcome to the The Spark & The Art creativity podcast. Thank you for subscribing to our weekly podcast, where we alternate between interviews with creative folks from all different career levels and insight and inspiration episodes. All with the intention you’ll get what you need to get your creative projects started and, more importantly, finished.

I’m your host Tucker and this week we're gonna talk about the three reasons to do anything. Achievement, Acclaim and the Almighty Dollar.

In our last episode we talked with comics artist Scott Kowalchuk. In the talk he talks about things he's learned from working with others on projects and from working with publishers for his comics. He says he is aiming to be more tactical in choosing projects and has a three piece filter he screens his projects through.

The three things are:

Will it fulfill him creatively? Will the increase his standing in his professional community? Will it offer adequate monetary compensation for the time it will take to complete?

Or as I've labelled them so they'll fit in a podcast headline: Achievement, Acclaim and the Almighty Dollar.

Most of the projects I do are for Achievement and Acclaim. The fact that I put out a weekly podcast or self published a kids book and music EP give me a standing in the creative community as someone who not only comes up with ideas but follows through (mostly) and to a level of quality. And when I'm done I'm proud I have finished and can share it with people. I can still see where I could have done better but I know I will do better on the next one. But the fact is that most of my projects barley break even and some have simply cost me money. That's why I'm a creative/ideas guy not a serial entrepreneur or business owner.

My day job though is for Acclaim and the Almighty Dollar. I make a salary and my work has allowed me a minor amount of standing within the UX/Design community in my city and within my company. There are moments of Achievement but not nearly to the level I feel when I complete a project of my own.

I've listened to a lot of interviews with famous actors and film makers over the years and one thing that often comes up is the idea of doing work in small independent movies because they believe in the project. They still get paid because their time and talents are valuable but it's usually a union scale salary rather than a movie star salary. And often they are so small they don't have the promotion budget required to get the film seen by as many people as they'd like. So they kind of disappear. These stars are doing these projects for Achievement. And then whether they are doing it for Acclaim or the Almighty dollar is for them to know, I guess. A comedian could do a small dramatic role to show that they could do the same in larger films. That's Acclaim. Or they could do the role so they can pay off their boat. The Almighty Dollar.

Scott Kowalchuk said he's looking for projects and publishers that will allow him to hit all three and that is a spectacular goal. I'm pretty sure that's the ultimate goal; that's what everyone is looking for.

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Do you know anyone struggling with why they are doing their work? If you enjoyed this episode i'd hope you'd share it with them. The easiest way to share is to send the short url TheSparkAndTheArt.com/108 the hardest way is to carve the url on the base of one of the Easter Island heads and hope that your friend visits one day and happens to see the url because they dropped gum while trying to blow a bubble.

Get me on twitter @sparkartpodcast and thanks for listening and remember: you won’t get the art without the work and you won’t do the work without the spark.